On Feb 14, 2009, at 2:34 AM, Jeff Miles wrote:
Your arguments are valid, but kind of missing the point. People are going to have to change, period, in the way they think of energy usage.
Right - eventually, if most non-dystopian futurists are correct, energy will be something we hardly think of at all due to its plentiful on demand nature. How we get there is the issue.
Or we're going to have to pour money and energy (pun intended) into changing what we use as energy. Very large cities were created due to trade. These huge cities, due to modern transport are no longer necessary.
Other way around - modern transport makes huge cities possible - without it we can not supply the food and consumables the denizens require. In our past, city size was a function of available food supply from the local country side via road, river, only occasionally via sea (think Rome). Modern economic theory - that would be free trade - when combined with modern transport made it possible to have large cities where the city owners did not control the source of the food.
They're just a remanent of the past that's struggling to hold on.
Struggling to hold on? The rate of urbanization is increasing last I heard.
How many cities are going broke trying to sustain their population and infrastructure?
How many are spending huge amounts of money on stuff other than core city services?
Bigger isn't always better. Didn't computers prove that?
It is also irrelevant, because sometimes bigger is better or more efficient.
Also, "industrial capacity" is a bit of a misnomer. It's relevant if you hope to sustain the world with no change. But the world with no change in its' past structure is becoming less relevant everyday.
Industrial capacity refers to the ability to make stuff - industry - that people want. I don't know what that will be next year, let alone next decade, with enough precision to get rich off the knowledge, but I do know people will want industrial products.
We, as a country or world, didn't start using electricity or oil over night.
But no one ever went back on electricity once it was available to them.
It's going to take time, acceptance and a means of profitability for those who help to make it viable for the industrialized world as a whole. There have been many great ideas put forth over the years to help jump start this. There has been next to no $ put forth compared to what's been spent to keep the oil flowing. And the oil, as anyone can plainly see, is a finite resource. But like our economy is showing today, we love to put stuff off.
Thank our progressive hide the true cost of things tax structure in part for that. We subsidized oil through our indirect taxes (income, business pass through taxes). Subsidies always distort the market - always.
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